Empty Hands Music
In the spirit of giving thanks this holiday season, we share with you a wonderful music video in the spirit of gratitude with the hope it will be spread wide and far, overflowing into acts of love and compassion.
We present to you, “Grateful: A Love Song to the World.”
A Flock camera monitors passing traffic in Miami, Florida.
As corporations, politicians, and tech bros usher in the era of artificial intelligence (AI), our community members continue to fight back against AI's incorporation into daily life. Particularly when it comes to opposing Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs).
ALPRs are becoming so sophisticated, with more AI components, that they cannot only surveil us using our license plates and the make and model of our car, but also increasingly distinguish how we dress and look, using AI to profile us into a large-scale database for future reference.
In Texas, there is consistent and growing backlash against ALPRs. So much community disdain has spurred Governor Abbott to pause all funding he initiated by funneling $30 million into Flock cameras. Most recently, Governor Abbott has stopped issuing permits for Flock and other ALPR contractors to install cameras on Texas roads. A performative push to pacify his constituents before this November’s election.
Meanwhile, Florida banned ALPRs on all state-maintained roads and highways, a move that reaches across the political aisle. While some leaders consider how much surveillance their constituents will allow, more and more people are being stopped because of false positives caused by the erroneous nature of ALPR cameras.
One report from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) showed that its internal Flock camera audits revealed a 32.3% false-positive rate. That means one in three drivers were falsely accused of driving a stolen vehicle. This, along with privacy and data concerns, led the LAPD to cancel its Flock contract. The false positives are becoming more common with ALPR devices. A college student who recently bought a new car has been stopped twice because the Flock system flagged the car’s temporary tags.
In other situations, it has led to false accusations and jail time. Lindsay Brooke Isaacs was charged with eight felonies for the alleged murder of three individuals during a car crash. Lindsay spent 13 days in jail before the officers realized they had arrested the wrong person. Another woman was falsely accused of stealing a package and spent weeks proving her innocence. The rate of false positives should leave you shivering in fear that one day you will be driving and falsely accused and arrested for a stolen vehicle, package, or worse, the death of another person.
A CNU study revealed that Flock cameras are often placed in low-income Black and Brown neighborhoods. The report noted that 8 out of 10 cameras were installed in Black neighborhoods. These areas had 4 times as many cameras as predominantly white, affluent neighborhoods. It is quite clear who the target of mass surveillance is.
Many proponents of ALPRs will parrot the common Flock marketing talking points about how effective mass surveillance is in reducing crime. However, in Atlanta (home to Flock’s corporate headquarters), they found that more mass surveillance devices do not mean less crime, nor do they lead to more crimes being solved.
Flock Safety isn’t the only ALPR manufacturer. Vigilant Solutions also openly shares over 1.5 billion data points with ICE and grants 9,200+ agents access to its database. Axon lurks in the shadows, covertly capitalizing on Flock’s flailing public image. Many municipalities have given in to malicious compliance, pretending to heed constituents' concerns.
Once municipalities end their contracts with Flock Safety, many immediately opt to contract with Axon, preferring their covert cameras that tend to “blend into surroundings." Police are even begging Axon to make some of its other cameras look different from Flock’s so citizens don’t destroy them.
One thing to note about Axon is that they are one of the biggest contractors with law enforcement. Many departments already use their tasers and body cameras. Once they add an ALPR contract to those lucrative deals, it will be difficult for the public to remove them.
According to ACPC, Flock cameras have increased eightfold. Yet, crime clearance rates across eight different categories, including homicide, car theft, and robbery, have all remained static. Most proponents of ALPRs can only share anecdotal stories of success because when we examine the statistics and raw data, it’s clear we are being sold a mass surveillance system disguised as an ineffective public safety tool.
ALPR devices do not solve crime. They will not reduce crime. They are more likely to be used against you, linking you to an alleged crime you never committed. This can lead to hardships, the loss of the presumption of innocence, and jail time. Corporate talking points have been market-tested to prey on our fears and make us believe that an expensive mass surveillance system is the only way we can be safe.
There is no shelter, no alternative, for mass surveillance. We must stop it before the digital panopticon is solidified and normalized. Citizens are asking, fighting, and defending our rights to be protected and honored, yet our elected officials and law enforcement officers would rather ignore and undermine them all. All to normalize a dystopian future of AI cameras on every block, because a flock is only safe when the shepherd has eyes on your every move.
Christopher Rivera is the senior advocacy manager for the criminal legal program at the Texas Civil Rights Project.
Michelle Martinez, the inaugural director of the Tishman Center for Social Justice and the Environment at the University of Michigan (U-M)
When Michelle Martinez talks about climate change, she does not begin with temperatures, emissions, or models and projections.
She begins with people. For Martinez, the inaugural director of the Tishman Center for Social Justice and the Environment at the University of Michigan (U-M), climate change is already being experienced through the housing, economic, and political crises confronting communities today. And that makes climate justice inseparable from a more basic civic question: Who has the power to decide what happens to a community?
The Tishman Center, established in 2021 at U-M’s School for Environment and Sustainability, was created around a particular idea of what a university can do in that struggle. Made possible through gifts from The NorthLight Foundation and Dan and Sheryl Tishman, the center connects students with environmental justice organizations and community leaders, supports community-led research, and prepares students to work on the problems communities are already facing.
That model grew partly from what Martinez felt was missing during her years working in environmental justice in Detroit.
“What I really needed from the university was a constant and steady support, with actionable research that could result in policy change,” she said.
Communities' needs, however, rarely follow the timetable of academic research. Environmental justice organizations may be responding to air pollution permits, legislative calendars, or the proposed siting of major developments while researchers are still developing a study.
“Communities like mine often need a more engaged and rapid response,” Martinez said, “but also a kind of scholarship that relies on relationship building.”
That distinction is central to how Martinez describes the Center's approach. The goal is not only to bring university expertise into communities, but to change how students and researchers understand their role.
“When we start to see ourselves as researchers, or as students in higher education, as participants in civic society, we can really start to change our orientation towards the expert,” she said.
The Center’s Climate Justice Movement Catalysts Fellowship reflects this idea by placing students in community organizations and supporting them with mentorship, financial assistance, and professional development. The Center describes the fellowship as a way to build leadership while contributing research and capacity to environmental justice organizations.
For Alexandrah Walker, a Catalyst Fellow working with the College of Menominee Nation’s Sustainable Development Institute, that relationship begins with listening. After first visiting the institute in January, she continued building relationships with its staff through summer visits and online meetings. Her work included mentoring undergraduate interns, helping them develop work plans, discussing their goals and troubleshooting challenges as they progressed.
“Working in/for/with community really requires you to cast your ego aside and what you think you know, and instead listen and strive to build healthy reciprocal relationships centered on trust and respect while being cognizant of cultural boundaries and customs,” Walker said.
Her experience illustrates the Center’s philosophy in practice. The work is not only about bringing knowledge acquired in a university into a community. It also requires students to build relationships, understand local contexts, and support people in pursuing their own goals.
In one example Martinez discussed, students worked with a Sikh community whose approach to sustainability was rooted in its cultural traditions. Practices such as energy efficiency and composting became more meaningful when they were connected to the community's existing values.
“Nobody was against those things, but by embedding it into cultural tradition, it had a place. It had a home,” Martinez said.
She described another project in northern Michigan involving tribal knowledge, land governance and technology. The work brought together efforts to reclaim Anishinaabe fire management practices with LiDAR technology and elders' knowledge. The point was not to replace community knowledge with technical expertise, but to bring different forms of knowledge into the same conversation.
That same approach is increasingly relevant as new pressures emerge.
Martinez is now working with roughly a dozen environmental justice organizations around the Great Lakes to understand how communities are thinking about the rapid growth of data centers. Many of these communities already live with the legacy of fossil-fuel infrastructure. Data centers introduce another major demand for energy and land, raising questions about who benefits from development and what communities want in return.
In Minnesota, Martinez recalled, organizers who had previously mobilized around protecting immigrant communities became involved in a fight over a proposed data center. When the city asked what the community wanted, the answer was not necessarily another technological solution. They wanted housing for people experiencing homelessness.
“The sort of intersectional approach, what civil society needs amidst climate chaos and political crises, is far more robust and responsive,” Martinez said.
For Martinez, this is part of what a just transition requires: communities having enough power to articulate what they actually want their future to look like.
“We really are trying to change the priorities of how people vision the future,” she said.
The Center's investment in students also extends beyond their time at Michigan.
Martinez pointed to Dr. Malu Castro, now a postdoctoral fellow at U-M’s School for Environment and Sustainability, as one example. Castro works with Kyle Whyte on Indigenous land restoration efforts and teaches courses on Indigenous sustainability and Indigenous rights. His scholarship grew from work on an ʻāina, or land, back initiative on Molokaʻi in Hawaiʻi, examining the theoretical and practical questions surrounding financing and pricing in Indigenous land restoration.
Martinez added that students with the resources, relationships, and space to pursue community-rooted work can carry those relationships into their scholarship and professional lives. The university becomes less of a place where knowledge is produced about communities and more of a place where people develop the capacity to work with them.
That is also how Martinez measures the Center's longer-term success.
“Over the next 30 years, what I would love to see is students building resiliency inside of communities that are most at risk,” she said.
The measure, she acknowledged, is difficult. Resilience might mean stronger housing institutions, greater capacity to resist criminalization or deportation, or the ability of a community to respond when the next crisis arrives. Those outcomes may take years or decades to become visible.
The difficulty is compounded by the barriers students themselves face. Martinez pointed to tuition, housing, caregiving responsibilities, and the distance many students must travel as obstacles that can prevent people from participating fully in this kind of work.
For her, those barriers raise a larger question about what society expects universities to do at a moment when communities are confronting overlapping environmental, economic and political crises.
That question becomes particularly urgent when climate change is discussed as something that will happen in the future.
For many communities, Martinez said, the crisis is already present.
“The disaster is already here,” she said.
Housing, education, domestic violence, drug use and economic and political instability are realities that are often discussed separately from climate change, according to Martinez. Yet, in her view, they are connected to how communities are equipped to respond to environmental disruption.
“It's not the weather itself; it's the divestment of the political system to respond to the weather,” Martinez said.
The response, then, strips away the idea of a single technological breakthrough and focuses more on investments in public transportation, walkable communities, housing, and local institutions.
It also raises difficult questions about the relationship between universities and the communities they study.
“When we have scholars who aren't taking social or political risks and leave communities to take those risks, that becomes a dual exploitation,” Martinez said.
Researchers can gain intellectual property, professional recognition and career advancement while communities bear the risks of the work, she argued. The Tishman Center is attempting to approach that relationship differently.
“We lock arms,” Martinez said, describing the Center's commitment to human rights, sovereignty and community agency.
The ambition is larger than producing better research. It is to create relationships through which communities can help determine what knowledge is produced, how it is used and what kinds of futures are considered possible.
That makes the Tishman Center an experiment in the civic role of a university. Its work asks whether higher education can become more than a place where students acquire expertise before entering public life. It can also be a place where students learn to participate in civic life while they are still there, alongside communities already doing the work.
For Martinez, the measure of that experiment may ultimately be found outside the university: in whether students leave with the relationships and skills to help communities build institutions, exercise greater control over their futures and withstand the crises ahead.
Val Amiel Vestil is a Graduate student at the University of Michigan and fall fellow with The Fulcrum.
Scarcity drains mental bandwidth and can depress voter turnout. Explore the research and how human ecology education can build civic knowledge and agency.
Access to food, stable housing, healthcare, and socioeconomic security shapes more than daily life. Material insecurity can also limit the time, attention, and stability people need to follow public issues, evaluate candidates, organize, and vote. Research on scarcity and political participation helps explain these connections.
In a 2014 American Psychological Association article, the authors of the book Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, Eldar Shafir and Sendhil Mullainathan, suggest that scarcity consumes mental bandwidth, leaving fewer cognitive resources for planning and problem-solving. The article reports that this cognitive burden can produce ongoing deficits and reinforce self-defeating behavior.
These pressures do not make people deficient citizens. They can, however, make civic participation harder. Legal citizenship and voting rights do not ensure that everyone has an equal capacity to participate. Voting requires time, information, skills, health, and transportation. Unequal access to resources affects civic participation, which also dependson income, education, and an individual’s stability. Disparities in participation can, in turn, produce unequal political representation.
Human ecology education raises a related question: whether practical knowledge can help people navigate the systems shaping daily life and participate more meaningfully in their communities.
A 2024 article in the journal Political Behavior examines how unemployment, eviction, loss of health insurance, and other personal crises affect political participation. Although people experience these disruptions personally, the authors argue that their causes and consequences are also political.
Across several large surveys, the researchers found that personal crises were generally associated with lower turnout but sometimes with greater participation in other political activities. Highly politicized crises, including those related to COVID-19, were associated with greater participation across all forms measured in the study. As crises accumulated, the associated decline in turnout approached the size of established gaps by race, ethnicity, and education.
Residential mobility can also disrupt civic ties. In the five-city Moving to Opportunity experiment, some families living in high-poverty public housing were offered vouchers to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods. A 2024 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that adults assigned vouchers voted at lower rates for nearly two decades. The researchers attribute the decline to residential mobility itself, noting that moving can disrupt social ties and require people to register again.
Various psychological theories provide context for how material insecurity can influence political behavior. Abraham Maslow’s 1943 theory of human motivation offers a familiar framework, commonly called the hierarchy of human needs, for considering how unmet needs can compete for attention. It identifies physiological needs, safety, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization as basic needs, but they should not be treated as a universal sequence or as indicators for how a person engages with the political process. For this article, it serves only as a bridge to explain the relationship among material security, personal agency, and civic participation.
Psychologist Albert Bandura defined self-efficacy as a person’s belief in their capacity to act toward a desired outcome. He identified four principal sources: mastery experiences, vicarious experiences, social persuasion, and physiological and emotional states. Insecurity involving food, housing, healthcare, income, or physical safety may weaken these foundations by limiting opportunities for successful action, increasing chronic stress, and reducing access to supportive models and encouragement.
Political efficacy has two components: internal and external efficacy. Internal efficacy is the belief that one can understand and participate in politics; external efficacy is the belief that the political system responds to citizens. Both are associated with political participation, although the relationship is stronger for internal efficacy. Successful political participation may strengthen confidence in one’s ability to engage. When people participate but see no institutional response, they may begin to doubt that participation matters and withdraw.
Human ecology education is an interdisciplinary approach to understanding how people live within—and navigate—the natural, social, cultural, built, and technological environments that shape daily life. It connects practical knowledge about food, housing, health, finance, transportation, relationships, and community life with the institutions and systems people navigate to meet those needs.
Human ecology grew partly from home economics, which combined scientific research with public education about food, health, housing, and family life. Home economists at universities, extension services, and government agencies carried this work through World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. Cornell played a significant role, establishing the New York State College of Home Economics in 1925; it was renamed the New York State College of Human Ecology in 1969 as its academic scope broadened.
Civics education generally focuses on government and citizenship, while career education prepares students for employment. Human ecology complements both by connecting personal, professional, and civic life to the public systems and markets that shape everyday decisions. A continuous K–12 program can deepen that understanding as students mature and their lives become more complex.
Maslow’s categories can help organize a human ecology curriculum without assigning children to fixed developmental tiers. The curriculum would expand as students gain independence and encounter more complex relationships, institutions, and responsibilities.
Early Years: Food, Health, and Home
In the early grades, a human ecology curriculum can examine food, clothing, housing, health, safety, and household routines. Lessons can introduce where essential resources come from, how daily choices affect personal and environmental well-being, and which community institutions help people meet basic needs. The purpose would be to build practical awareness—not hold children responsible for conditions beyond their control.
Middle Years: Relationships and Community
As students’ social worlds become more complex, human ecology education can explore communication, culture, relationships, transportation, public health, and community life. Students can learn how families and communities use shared systems, resolve problems, and create belonging across differences.
Adolescence: Independent Life and Civic Participation
By adolescence, the curriculum can address income, employment, personal finance, housing, healthcare, law, consumer systems, and public institutions. Students can connect daily decisions to career possibilities and public policy while practicing the judgment, communication, and social skills needed to participate in professional and community life.
Human ecology education can strengthen the practical knowledge people use to navigate daily life. Whether that knowledge supports civic participation also depends on material security and responsive institutions.
US Census Bureau data show that 66.8 percent of citizens age 18 and older voted in 2020, the highest turnout of the twenty-first century. In the bureau’s family-income table, reported turnout among adult citizens rose from 47.1 percent for family incomes under $10,000 to 63.1 percent for
30,000–39,999 and 80.5 percent for 100,000–149,999.
Three civic design principles follow from this account:
1. Treat personal security as part of civic infrastructure: Policies that reduce economic volatility may also reduce the cognitive demands associated with material insecurity.
2. Make participation consequential: Participatory budgeting processes, public hearings, and other public forums should provide clear ways for people to influence decisions and see how institutions respond.
3. Create local opportunities to participate: Schools, neighborhoods, workplaces, and community groups can provide regular places for people to address shared concerns together.
Democratic participation depends on more than formal rights. People also need the material stability, practical knowledge, social connection, and confidence to act on those rights. Human ecology education can strengthen practical knowledge and personal agency, but it cannot replace the economic security or responsive institutions that make participation possible.
Sandra Ericson is an author and retired educator. She chaired the Consumer Arts and Science Department at City College of San Francisco for nearly three decades. She is a contributor to the Observatory.
This article was produced for the Observatory by the Independent Media Institute and is republished with permission.
Close Up Hand of Man Pointing to an I Voted Sticker Place on His Shirt
The 2026 midterm elections were never going to be a referendum on one person. They were always a test of whether Americans believed their leaders were addressing the issues affecting their daily lives.
Voters delivered a clear message in the midterm elections. The results were historic. Democrats not only reclaimed control of the House of Representatives, but also captured a majority in the U.S. Senate.
The victories, especially in states long considered safe Republican territory, reflect deeper frustrations that have been building for months. Across the country, Americans have continued to grapple with high prices for everyday necessities while watching an escalating conflict in Iran consume national attention. For many voters, the concerns they carry into grocery stores, gas stations, and monthly budget meetings were not being adequately addressed.
That sentiment appeared to transcend geography and party labels. In North Carolina, former Gov. Roy Cooper's victory offered one of the night's earliest signals that voters were prepared to chart a new course. "Tonight, we told Washington loud and clear that North Carolinians will always matter more than the billionaires and the insiders," Cooper said after his win. Whether one agrees with his politics or not, his message tapped into a broader anxiety about who government is serving.
A similar sentiment emerged in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, where Democrat Bob Brooks flipped a competitive House district. Celebrating his victory, Brooks told supporters, "Tonight, the Lehigh Valley made history and sent a firefighter to put out the dumpster fire in Washington, D.C." The line drew cheers, but it also reflected a broader voter frustration with a political system that many Americans increasingly view as disconnected from the economic and kitchen-table concerns dominating their daily lives.
Whether one agrees with their politics or not, Cooper and Brooks' messages tapped into a growing anxiety about who government is serving and whether elected leaders are focused on solving problems rather than fueling partisan conflict.
The election also revealed something that political strategists often overlook: voters are not static. They are responsive. They evaluate results. They reward leaders who address their concerns and punish those who do not.
Some Republicans quickly downplayed the results' significance. An anonymous White House official argued that "President Trump was not on the ballot, and it's proven that Trump voters show up when he is on the ballot." That may be true. But it misses a larger point. Midterms are often less about personalities and more about governing. They offer one of the few opportunities citizens have to express their satisfaction or discontent with the country's direction between presidential elections.
What struck me most about this election was not the partisan realignment. It was the reminder that democracy remains accountable to voters. Despite intense polarization, endless cable news debates, and social media battles, Americans still have the power to alter the political landscape when they feel unheard.
The lesson for Democrats and Republicans should be straightforward.
Voters want leaders focused on solving problems. They want an economy that works for working families. They want transparency and accountability when the nation enters military conflicts. They want confidence that government is listening, not lecturing.
In the coming days, partisans will be tempted to treat these results as either a mandate or an ideological rejection. I see something more fundamental. Americans are demanding responsiveness. They are demanding results.
Whether Democrats can meet those expectations remains an open question. Winning elections is easier than governing. The same voters who handed them victories this week will almost certainly hold them accountable tomorrow.
But for one night at least, the electorate reminded Washington of its most important role in our system. Citizens are not spectators. They are the ultimate decision-makers.
And when enough of them decide that change is necessary, even the strongest political assumptions can disappear in a single election cycle.
Hugo Balta is the executive editor of The Fulcrum and the publisher of the Latino News Network
